The Music Producer's Guide To Polymeter and Polyrhythm: The Music Producer's Guide

The Music Producer's Guide to Polymeter and Polyrhythm

Published by Stereo Output Limited, company number 11174059

Copyright © Ashley Hewitt 2024

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Chapter 1: The Basics

Polyrhythm and polymeter are two phenomena that should be part of your music production repertoire. This is because they open a fascinating world of rhythmic invention and possibility. In this book, I will show you how to harness these phenomena in your own productions.

To understand and use them, some preparation is needed—especially for those whose experience in using meter might be limited to only four beats to the bar.

Most music has a continuous pulse running through it. Many musicians refer to this pulse as the beat. This beat can be anything from the subtle pulse implied when someone plays an acoustic guitar to the strong pulse of the kickdrum in House and Techno. However, the beat is also at play when we feel the tension built by the fast, staccato notes of a snare drum roll, or when we feel that a piece of music is about to finish. The beat gives us that intuitive map of what we expect from a piece of music.

This beat proceeds not only cyclically, it also does so on many fractal levels. Each time cycle contains other lesser cycles within itself, while often being a part of a greater cycle—rather like a tree in which the trunk divides into branches, and these branches divide into smaller branches.

This fractal nature of musical time is the reason that notes are input and stored in DAW software using a grid, as shown in Figure 1.1:

Figure 1.1: Within the grid in DAW software, time runs horizontally, with pitch running vertically, creating a two-dimensional view of notes.

Tempo

So far as discrete musical time is concerned, the beat acts as a driver, imparting to the music a sense of propulsion and forward movement through the journey of the music.

Although the beat may be a regular one, the length of each beat is key. In some pieces of music, the beats are sparse. This produces a perception in the listener that the music is moving at a slow speed. In other pieces, the beats are dense, which produces the feeling that the music is moving at a fast speed.

The name for this quality of the music is tempo, which is the speed at which the music should be played. During the classical era of music, tempo represented a stylised feature of musical expression, and it was denoted by Italian terms, such as adagio (slow), moderato (moderate)and presto (fast). There was always some margin of flexibility for the performer to interpret these tempo designations in their own way.

Tempo, as a more exact feature of our music, only really developed with the invention of the metronome. This was a mechanical device with a moving arm that ticked at the exact speed at which the music is to be played, as shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2: A metronome allowed for more precise measurements of musical tempo.

The speed itself could then be represented by how many of these beats occurred each minute, i.e., beats per minute. A tempo of 180 beats per minute was fast, a tempo of 100 beats per minute was moderate, and a tempo of 40 beats per minute was very slow.

We use the same measurement of tempo these days, with each genre having its own tempo expectation. This is shown in Table 1.1:

Table 1.1: A range of expected tempi for various contemporary music genres.

Another fundamental building block of musical time is duration. We shall explore this in the next chapter.

Exercises

Write a drum track, then move the tempo of your DAW around while it is playing, all the way from its lowest possible setting to its highest. Reflect upon the experience—at what extremes of tempo does your drum track cease to make sense?

Chapter 2: Duration

There are two important factors that govern the placement of sound events, such as notes, within a piece of music. The first is the location of the sound event as a part of the track. This location is calibrated in terms of bars, beats and sub-beats. The second is the duration of the sound event.

To get a handle on these parameters, it is vital for us to understand how musical time is partitioned, along with the signs and symbols that are used to represent those partitions. Fortunately, if you have a grounding in Western music theory and can read written music, you can skip to Chapter 3. If you don’t, it is worth learning the time values given in this chapter. The music theory in this book is impossible to articulate without at least some grounding. Fortunately, it’s very easy to learn, and will be useful to you throughout your musical career!

Time values

In Western music, duration is represented by a series of time values that signify units,